Posted on 12/31/2004 5:43:33 AM PST by white trash redneck
No issue, not one, threatens to do more damage to the Republican coalition than immigration. There's no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party's leaders. Immigration for Republicans in 2005 is what crime was for Democrats in 1965 or abortion in 1975: a vulnerable point at which a strong-minded opponent could drive a wedge that would shatter the GOP.
President Bush won reelection because he won 10 million more votes in 2004 than he did in 2000. Who were these people? According to Ruy Teixeira--a shrewd Democratic analyst of voting trends--Bush scored his largest proportional gains among white voters who didn't complete college, especially women. These voters rallied to the president for two principal reasons: because they respected him as a man who lived by their treasured values of work, family, honesty, and faith; and because they trusted him to keep the country safe.
Yet Bush is already signaling that he intends to revive the amnesty/guestworker immigration plan he introduced a year ago--and hastily dropped after it ignited a firestorm of opposition. This plan dangerously divides the Republican party and affronts crucial segments of the Republican vote.
The plan is not usually described as an "amnesty" because it does not immediately legalize illegal workers in this country. Instead, it offers illegals a three-year temporary work permit. But this temporary permit would be indefinitely renewable and would allow illegals a route to permanent residency, so it is reasonably predictable that almost all of those illegals who obtain the permit will end up settling permanently in the United States. The plan also recreates the guestworker program of the 1950s--allowing employers who cannot find labor at the wages they wish to pay to advertise for workers outside the country. Those workers would likewise begin with a theoretically temporary status; but they too would probably end up settling permanently.
This is a remarkably relaxed approach to a serious border-security and labor-market problem. Employers who use illegal labor have systematically distorted the American labor market by reducing wages and evading taxes in violation of the rules that others follow. The president's plans ratify this gaming of the system and encourage more of it. It invites entry by an ever-expanding number of low-skilled workers, threatening the livelihoods of low-skilled Americans--the very same ones who turned out for the president in November.
National Review has historically favored greater restrictions on legal as well as illegal immigration. But you don't have to travel all the way down the NR highway to be troubled by the prospect of huge increases in immigration, with the greatest increases likely to occur among the least skilled.
The president's permissive approach has emboldened senators and mayors (such as New York's Michael Bloomberg) to oppose almost all enforcement actions against illegals. In September 2003, for example, Bloomberg signed an executive order forbidding New York police to share information on immigration offenses with the Immigration Service, except when the illegal broke some other law or was suspected of terrorist activity. And only last month, a House-Senate conference stripped from the intelligence-overhaul bill almost all the border-security measures recommended by the 9/11 commission.
The president's coalition is already fracturing from the tension between his approach to immigration and that favored by voters across the country. Sixty-seven House Republicans--almost one-third of the caucus--voted against the final version of the intelligence overhaul. And I can testify firsthand to the unpopularity of the amnesty/guestworker idea: I was on the conservative talk-radio circuit promoting a book when the president's plan was first proposed last January. Everywhere I went, the phones lit up with calls from outraged listeners who wanted to talk about little else. Every host I asked agreed: They had not seen such a sudden, spontaneous, and unanimous explosion of wrath from their callers in years.
Five years ago, Candidate George W. Bush founded his approach to immigration issues on a powerful and important insight: The illegal-immigration problem cannot be solved by the United States alone. Two-thirds of the estimated 9 million illegals in the U.S. are from Mexico. Mexico is also the largest source of legal immigration to the United States. What caused this vast migration? Between 1940 and 1970, the population of Mexico more than doubled, from 20 million to 54 million. In those years, there was almost no migration to the United States from Mexico at all. Since 1970, however, some 65 million more Mexicans have been born--and about 20 million of them have migrated northward, with most of that migration occurring after 1980.
Obviously, the 30 years from 1940 to 1970 are different in many ways from the 30 years after 1970s. But here's one factor that surely contributed to the Mexican exodus: In the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, the Mexican economy grew at an average rate of almost 7 percent a year. Thanks to the oil boom, the Mexican economy continued to grow rapidly through the troubled 1970s. But since 1980, Mexico has averaged barely 2 percent growth. The average Mexican was actually poorer in 1998 than he had been in 1981. You'd move too if that happened to you.
Recognizing the connection between Mexican prosperity and American border security, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations all worked hard to promote Mexican growth. The Reagan and Clinton administrations bailed out Mexican banks in 1982 and 1995; the first Bush administration negotiated, and Clinton passed, NAFTA. George W. Bush came to office in 2001 envisioning another round of market opening with the newly elected government of his friend Vicente Fox, this time focusing on Mexico's protected, obsolete, economically wasteful, and environmentally backward energy industry.
Bush's hopes have been bitterly disappointed. The Fox government has actually done less to restore Mexican growth than the PRI governments of the 1990s. And so Bush has been pushed away from his grand vision and has instead accepted Fox's demand that the two countries concentrate on one issue: raising the status of Mexican illegals in the United States. But this won't work. Just as the U.S. cannot solve the problem by unilateral policing, so it also cannot solve it through unilateral concession. Bush had it right the first time.
Some of the president's approach to immigration remains right and wise. He is right to show a welcoming face to Hispanics legally resident in the United States. He is right to try to smooth the way to citizenship for legal permanent residents. He is right--more controversially--to give all who have contributed to Social Security, whatever their legal status, access to benefits from the Social Security account.
But he is wrong, terribly wrong, to subordinate border security to his desire for an amnesty deal--and still more wrong to make amnesty the centerpiece of his immigration strategy.
Right now, of course, the president does not have to worry much about political competition on the immigration issue. But Republicans shouldn't count on their opponents' ignoring such an opportunity election after election. "I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants," Hillary Clinton told a New York radio station in November. And later: "People have to stop employing illegal immigrants. I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work." Okay, so maybe Hillary will never pick up many votes in Red State America. But there are Democratic politicians who could.
Republicans need a new and better approach--one that holds their constituency together and puts security first.
First, Republicans should develop and practice a new way of speaking about immigration, one that makes clear that enforcement of the immigration laws is not anti-immigrant or anti-Mexican: It is anti-bad employer. Illegal immigration is like any other illegal business practice: a way for unscrupulous people to exploit others to gain an advantage over their law-abiding competitors.
Second, Republicans can no longer deny the truth underscored by the 9/11 commission: Immigration policy is part of homeland-security policy. Non-enforcement of the immigration laws is non-protection of Americans against those who would do them harm.
Third, Republicans have to begin taking enforcement seriously. It's ridiculous and demoralizing to toss aside cabinet nominees like Linda Chavez over alleged immigration violations while winking at massive law-breaking by private industry--or to regard immigration violations as so trivial that they can be used as a face-saving excuse for the dismissal of a nominee damaged by other allegations.
Fourth, skills shortages in the high-technology and health-care industries are genuine problems that have to be addressed--but they should not be used as an excuse to void immigration enforcement. Republicans can say yes to using immigration law to attract global talent, while saying no to companies that systematically violate immigration law to gain an advantage over their more scrupulous rivals.
Fifth, Mexico should not be allowed to sever the migration issue from trade and investment issues. Mexican political stability is a vital national-security issue of the United States--and just for that reason, Americans should not allow Mexican governments to use migration as a way to shirk the work of economic and social reform.
Finally--and most important--Republicans need to recognize that they have a political vulnerability and must take action to protect themselves. An election victory as big as 2004 can look inevitable in retrospect. But it wasn't, not at all. The Democrats could have won--and could still win in 2006 and 2008--by taking better advantage of Republican mistakes and making fewer of their own. And no mistake offers them a greater opportunity than the one-sidedness of the Bush immigration policy. The GOP is a party dedicated to national security, conservative social values, and free-market economics. The president's policy on immigration risks making it look instead like an employers' lobby group. That's the weak point at which the edge of the wedge could enter--and some smart Democratic politician is sharpening it right now.
Did you miss the whole part about illegals registering their *employers*?!
Once the employer is registered by an illegal, he's going to be subject to compliance verification...something that we can't yet do to over 1 million currently anonymous employers of illegals.
Calm down with an effective tranquilizer or twelve.
Iran and Suadi Arabia have for years averaged around 8 beheadings (legal executions) per day for criminals who violated their anti-drug laws (mandatory death penalty).
Apparently, criminals all seem to have it in their heads that the penalties don't matter because they think that they won't be the ones who get caught...
It does create an incentive to do that doesn't it? I wonder if the trade in fraudulent documents has spiked up this year?
OOOOOH, let Ted Olson get it published! Very nice!
Your missing conservative credentials are again????????
bttt
You have it exactly right.
BlackElk wants to take in masses of illegal so he can wage ethnic warfare against Anglos in a "cleansing action" so he can turn America into his idea of a pre-Vatican II paradise.
Funny, I thought Father Coughlin was dead.
Be afraid! Be very afraid! Just joking!
Please don't wait. There is a place at DU for you right now.
Do you have some specific complaint about my #329 to back up the anti-American claim? I thought not. Your socialist nanny is calling! Time to back on your meds.
Frankly, you are the one who wants to institute mob rule, ethnic cleansing, and mass deportations in the name of "conservatism". Sounds more like fascism to me.
I've seen two posters already write they are inclined to vote for Hillary.
Either they are lonely single men, DU trolls, or just plain crazy.
If you mention me, ping me. Common FR courtesy!
I don't know about a spike this year, but here's some information on documents.
*
PILGRIM: Tonight, grave new concerns about who is trying to sneak into this country illegally and how they are doing it. The Homeland Security Department says that stolen passports are far too often making it past immigration agents.
At the same time, new technology used by border guards has caught 23,000 suspected criminals trying to sneak through our borders in the last three months.
.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Even when the government is on the lookout for a known stolen passport, there's a good chance its holder will still get into this country.
A government review of five years of immigration and customs data found 136 entries with stolen passports. Seventy-nine were with passports that were not yet flagged as stolen, but 57 were with passports the government knew were stolen.
*****And, unbelievably, after September 11, 33 people used stolen passports that this government was looking for and still made it into the country. This review covered only passports from six European countries. There's no telling how many more passports from other countries made it through.*******
The inspector general's review suggested that Customs and Border Patrol better scrutinize foreigners whose passports are flagged as stolen and keep better records. Officials say they are making progress.
WILLIAM HEFFELFINGER, CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION: We're doing a great deal of work to identify everyone who comes in and out of this country. So, if there's some way that someone might attempt to get in using stolen passports, we want to address that, and we have.
ROMANS: A separate Border Patrol initiative shows reason to fear many of those people illegally crossing our borders. *****New technology used by the Border Patrol detected an astonishing 23,000 dangerous criminals trying to sneak into this country, and that's just from September to November this year.*****
Using a high-tech fingerprint database, border guards identified 84 foreigners suspected of murder, 37 for kidnapping, 151 wanted for rape, 212 for robbery, 1,200 for other assaults and 2,600 for dangerous drug crimes.
All these suspected criminals tried to enter this country through our porous land borders, mainly the border we share with Mexico, but also Canada, 23,502 criminals in just 91 days this fall. Border Patrol agents arrested all of them.
ROMANS: It's impossible, Kitty, to know how many more slipped through the cracks.
PILGRIM: It's shocking about the passports. What are they doing to try to stop this?
ROMANS: A couple of things, technology, trying to automate more of this, but also an awful lot of common sense. Some of these immigration customs agents are simply asking questions, saying you're on a lookout list, I have a list here that says this is a stolen passport and then letting them through if the person has a good enough explanation. That's not going to be allowed anymore.
PILGRIM: Talking their way through. That's pretty...
ROMAN: Talking their way through in many cases.
http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/lou.dobbs.tonight/
Aired 12/21/04
Guess you didn't want to discuss any of the many *mandatory* laws, gov't has passed for citizens........or nice fat EIC checks... 8 million yearly ???
Any plans on the *anchor babies* yet?? How 'bout *existing* anchor babies, or illegal home owners ?? do they get to go to the front of the *new* illegal line ??
No way this "proposal" is really fair......looks like if your the first here, with the first kid, job, house & a car......you will indeed get the most places open for "guest workers".
Just as Fox & friends have wanted all along.
The AFL-CIO contributes to MALDEF.
I(FBD) no longer waste precious time to read or respond to mindless Open Borders arguments.
Note to myself(Dane), I must have hit a nerve, since the hillary caucus on FR is flustered and they don't have flying monkeys on FR to pick me up and whisk me away, and never to be heard forever again, IMO.
LOL. The mix of various and/or competing agendas in this thread is quite fascinating to observe actually.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.